1. Field of the Invention
The invention presented herein relates generally to armor repair. More specifically, the present invention relates to a kit with components for performing armor repair on vehicles or other protected structures in the field and/or in local unit facilities, such as a motor pool.
2. Description of Related Art
Armor is often damaged while in service due to hostile attack or accidental action and the compromised ballistic/blast performance of damaged armor puts protected personnel such as police, security or military personnel in danger. Many times, especially in an active military theater of operations, military personnel are forced to either rely on damaged armor or compromise unit readiness levels by de-activating vehicles that are drivable, but have compromised protection levels. This difficult choice is incurred because such hostile or accidental damage occurs, for example, when out on extended patrol, replacement parts for the damaged armor may not be available or because the depot-level maintenance required for repair cannot be immediately scheduled.
Armor can be damaged in various ways through, for example, blast, traffic impacts, hostile ballistic strikes, encounters with mines or improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and/or penetrations. All of these occurrences reduce the level of ballistic or blast performance of the designed protection system. In fact, the reduction in performance level associated with armor damage often results in the scrapping of damaged armor removed from compromised vehicles and the refitting of new armor before the vehicle is returned to service. While replacing damaged armor may provide complete performance recovery, scrapping and refitting armor is costly and does not address the reduction in performance during the time period from when the damage occurs to the repair opportunity. Additionally, vehicles repaired by replacing damaged armor are typically out of service for an extended period of time, which may compromise operational readiness.
Repairing damaged metallic armor generally involves welding processes that utilize resources not readily available to a vehicle crew or unit motor pool. Moreover, gas-welding requires oxygen and volatile compressed fuel sources that can be dangerous to store on a vehicle in a combat situation and arc-welding requires extensive facilities. Welding also exposes armor adjacent to the damaged area to high heat, which may degrade the performance of undamaged armor in the vicinity of the weld repair. In addition, weld repairs are generally difficult for surface geometries that are not flat and include curved profiles, such as, concavities and convexities and/or geometric discontinuities. Further, while welding may be effective for metallic armor repair, it is not applicable to armor systems utilizing advanced composite and ceramic materials.
As such, there remains a need for compositions, kits and methods for repairing damaged armor in the field and in local unit facilities such as motor pools to improve the ballistic/blast performance of the damaged armor, reduce the danger to personnel protected by such armor and improve the operational readiness of the unit(s) to which the armored system is assigned.